The obsession with colour isn't about the colour. It's indicative of the general obsession in MMOs with gear quality. It has been like this since the dawn of time and always will be as long as gear is the primary means for character progression.

You get rid of colour, people will obsess about the item level again, or some other means of rank. Making superficial changes that don't really mean anything just because people have the wrong attitude is sort of a silly approach.

On top of that, it would remove the times when the colour is actually useful for evaluating items. The grey name is a very quick way to know an item can be safely vendored. A brown item is something you know you can mail to alts. If you find something orange, you know you've got something really, really special. And you know when a green drops in a dungeon that you probably don't need to plug it into your spreadsheet.

Finally, people care and obsess over a lot of dumb things, both in and outside of the game. The appropriate response is to realise those people are silly or misguided or exaggerating, not to remove the thing they're focused on.

If we remove colors, it would just transform into the gearscore thing all over.

Do away with ilevel too, then.

Because this community is so locked up with colors and ilevel, they forget the bigger picture: it's a game.

Can't freaking enjoy the game without dweebs judging you solely on your gear. The gear they brag about getting, but never mentioning it took 4/9/24 others to get it for him. He too busy calling the community "scrubs" and "noobs" from a perch as some god, instead. Never thinking how his attitude sours the community, and ruining their fun.

Lower the gear color and ilevel of LFR gear won't please him. He'll find another reason to scream about "welfare epics" (that dev probably hurt the game to the core, because he gave this mob a green light to sit and judge).

From the #1 Cata review on Amazon.com: "Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes. They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community."

Blizzard's blame game in action:Deleting 6,100+ of Kevyne's posts and threads from the WoW forums.

While color obsession is annoying, it does help to give you a visual indication of progress and general rarity of an item. Removing it would cause more problems than it would solve.

You know though to be honest it does seem that non crafted / non quest reward greens are much more rare than Epic item's these days.
For example I bet their are 10 times more tier breastplates for any given class/tier than there are jade breastplates on any given server.

I also don't think the color purple does nearly as good of job at representing someones progress as their Ilvl does the color coating system is just an inferior outdated way of classifying the rarity of items before the implementation of Ilvl and before any of them were made obsolete by green items in the next expansion.

It seems rather silly to do that, it accomplishes nothing but to remove people feeling good or bad. it's very mr. rogers, live and let live man.

while you're at it, let's remove grades in schools and make them numbers instead.... oh wait they do that.

It was never Hardcore Vs Casual. It was Socialites Vs. Solo players

Originally Posted by ringpriest

World of Warcraft started life as a Computer Roleplaying Game, where part of the fun of the game experience was pretending to be your character. Stuff like applying poisons and eating food enhanced the verisimilitude of the experience of playing a fantasy character in another world. Now that game has changed to become a tactical arcade lobby game.

But it's so cute when people whine about welfare epics when the term was coined in Burning Crusade (oh snap)

Yeah was kind of funny people gripped about those gear venders "don't wanna call them justice venders because if I remember right badges of somesort were used)

To be honest though I kind of felt TBC was a welfare expansion especially considering how easy it was for those of us who were raiding in 40m guilds in vanilla being forced into much easier 10m content, even acquiring pvp gear became stupidly easy.

Though I did quite enjoy that with every tier came a new bugged boss to gate the content.

Color is purely for item inspecting and when you see drops coming at you very quickly it helps to catch your eye and keep you from vendoring a potential upgrade. That's all there is to color coding. The rest of it, the obsession for better gear, the judging on quality of gear alone is a profitable consequence of game design.

After gating through levels and hours and hours of separation from the group as whole, once you arrive to the masses at max level, you'll need to be surveyed for your potential and you'll need to establish credit as a quality player. You want to be judged, but more importantly you want to be judged as a good player, and you want that good view to happen in a matter of seconds, not hours of gameplay, but seconds, just a quick fleeting glance at your epics as you mount up and ride off onto your next effort at improving. If you remove the color, then you become a player with gear (which is fine) but since it all looks the same, your efforts in HM will not be recognized immediately. If the players can do that then great, but culture changes don't happen overnight.

My idea would be to grow up and stop caring about color or about people who have a problem with color.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

... there are lots of different types of players, with different amounts of time to play, and different tastes for the content and difficulty and time commitment they want to give to any of those pieces of content. The person that plays for an hour or so a few times a week is playing the same game as the person that plays five hours every night.....

I'm so incredibly sick of the "LOLZ WELFARE EPICS" and "PURPLEZ FOR ONLY HARDCOREZ" bullshit that I'm proposing this idea: Totally get rid of the item color system, and if that's too much, redo it to the point where the whole uncommon/rare/epic/legendary system is gone.

Instead of going by color for item drops, just go by item level. It's easier, and it gets rid of the morons that obsess about an item's color.

I would rather have the development team working on some actual updates/patches rather then changing this system. If the colours are removed you're simply shifting the whole problem. People will be talking in terms of 'ilvl x-x range' instead of epic/purple and shit... So yeah, please don't :')

All of an item's stats are determined by its item level. Even when item level was hidden, people could figure out what it was based on the stat allocation. As long as the item has stats, "removing" item level won't change anything (besides requiring an addon to determine level).

While I agree that the colours are largely pointless right now at the maximum level, they are good guidelines for the players who are unfamiliar with how gear works in World of Warcraft. It would not fix the problem you are bringing up, if it really even is a big problem, but I would probably just rename the item colours into reflecting the item quality instead of rarity.